Small Friends Blog

Coburg RSL. Where the Boer War, the World Wars and Vietnam are jumbled together in two glass cabinets of memorabilia. The bar’s furniture is in upheaval, the walls smell of fresh paint and while we sit, turning over artifacts, two men mount a new flatscreen to the wall and then cheer as channel nine lights up the room.

We open medical kits rolled in neat little boxes, that could have been made by Brunswick hipsters selling moustache wax. But they weren’t. They were made last century, to be taken to war.

Gregory strikes gold. “The War Pictorial” a monthly magazine, contemporary to the war, full of photographs. We pour over them, showing each other the images, horses chest deep in mud, hospital tents tidy and shiny, hospital tents bombed and lying in piles of wreckage, women in munitions factories, women with shovels over their shoulders, women welding, women spinning wool to make bandages. I’m compelled by the pictures of these women.